Kevin Donoghue President

To me, it’s a sad fact that organizations waste millions of dollars attempting to manage telecom expenses manually. What’s worse, these manual processes are usually patch-worked together, clunky at best, and in the end, fail to deliver the desired savings.

Please stop the madness! There are straightforward methods to decrease telecom expenses and increase visibility to cost and best of all, they work. In my opinion, these are the top five ways to decrease telecom expenses:

1: Consolidate billing: Consider the fact that invoices rarely come to one centralized location. How can you accurately determine the total expenses with each vendor? Also, a single telecom carrier may have 10+ billing platforms and you’ve got multiple vendors providing services across your enterprise. Yikes. Let’s not even get into late payment penalties. It’s simple: consolidate your invoices and insist that each carrier provide billing in an electronic format.

2: Validate invoices monthly: This absolutely needs to be automated! The time and resources it takes to manually validate thousands of line items for each bill is undoable for most organizations. Rely on a TEM solution to automatically validate against telecom inventory and contracts every single month. Be proactive because your telecom carriers will not do this for you.

3: Regularly reconcile telecom inventory with billing: Your network is constantly in flux. This means you must compare MACD (Move, Add, Change, Delete) information with invoices on a regular basis. Save significantly by making sure all circuits are being billed properly, disconnects are removed from billing, and you’re not paying for non-working circuits.

4: Allocate costs accurately: Use a Call Accounting solution to help identify where voice and data dollars are spent.  You’ll simplify the budgeting process, increase managers’ awareness of their departments’ spending, track how individuals impact the budget, and increase P&L visibility. This level of accountability will cause spending to drop.

5: Provide managers with reporting to understand what’s driving expenses: Reporting pulls everything together.  It provides managers with detailed explanations of expenses, improves vendor management, and promotes accountability among employees. Reporting will also help demonstrate compliance to Sarbanes-Oxley mandates.